America’s Reckoning and Donald Trump

America’s economy is a mess, and its social fabric is fraying.

Powerful computers, handheld devices, robots, and artificial intelligence make our lives easier and workers more productive but destroy jobs at an alarming pace. The new opportunities created require a better education than most Americans receive.

These pressures are exacerbated by competition from Germany and other northern European countries where job training is better and Asia where labor is much cheaper. This is multiplied yet again by Washington’s failure to negotiate good international trade agreements and adequately defend Americans from foreign cheating on those agreements.

Politicians at all levels—obsessed with political correctness, victimhood, and identity politics—have dumped billions into failing public schools and universities, financed an increasing array of entitlements instead of adequate public investments in R&D and the infrastructure needed to support a technology-based economy, and sowed divisions and suspicion among ethnic groups, between men and women, and the successful and those deserving a genuine hand up.

The Obama Administration has doubled down on the policies that manufactured these conditions. It intensified pressures on businesses and universities on racial and gender quotas, and imposed political indoctrination of employees and students through mandatory diversity and sexual harassment training and the like.

It has expanded Medicaid, food stamps, the earned income tax credit and other income support programs, and increased loans and grants to students ill-prepared to acquire much of anything at college except burdensome debt and an impulse to vote for more government handouts.

Trump’s language may be crude, but after 40 plus years in the trenches of academia, managing bureaucrats and in policy battles of Washington and advising corporate leaders, I can attest he is absolutely right.

The big problem he or any Republican faces running for president is that too many poorly-educated Americans, minorities, and women have become dependent on government largess and preferences for employment opportunities, and none can speak honestly without being branded a racist, sexist, homophobe, and otherwise ridiculed to their demise in the New York Times, Washington Post, and major network newscasts.

Simply, there are more Americans on the dole and in government mandated sinecures than engaged in productive activities.

The takers can outvote the makers to block any effort to end the madness.

This is the kind of dysfunction that brought down Rome.

Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist. He tweets @pmorici1